The big bang, Part one: Before light.

The universe is expanding, it stands to reason that it started from a single point.

The universe started as a singularity an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.

This estimate is based on the rate the universe is expanding.

We know this because of the red-shift.

What is the red-shift? Well imagine a light emitting object, when it moves away from you each photon gets farther apart. When they are getting closer the photons bunch up more. This is called red-shift because red is on the lower end of the light spectrum and things tend to get "redder" as they move away.

The beginning.

In the begging all was a singularity, at this point no laws of physics existed.

We are not even sure if this point existed.

No signals we can measure could have come from this point. It was infinitely small and infinitely dense and may have been 0 dimensional. From this point the universe expanded.

The laws of physics.

The first thing really created were the laws of physics, well not really created. The fundamental forces were all one force which simply broke apart.

Little is understood.

Physics at this temperature has never been observed and at the levels of energy that existed will likely never exist again, for many reasons. It is thought that the universe could have been 0 dimensional as a singularity and at this time the energy allowed it to add new dimensions. From zero to one to two and so on. The problem is that the energy by around 3 gets so diluted that throughout the universe it is impossible for the entire thing to reach the next dimension. If we accelerate particles to enough energy we might measure a 4th dimension, but we will never be able to change a large portion of the universe.

The first that broke off was gravity. This is not strange as gravity is the most different from all the others. This was about 10^-50 seconds after the big bang. Next was the strong nuclear force at 10^-40 seconds. The last two were the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism at 10^-10 seconds after the big bang. The times are only the "preposed" times that work the best according to models of the early universe.
( more on forces here)
(more on split here )

Inflation and matter.

Before as far as we know it was pure energy with no matter. Now the universe is filled with Quark-gluon plasma.

Quark-Gluon plasma is the hottest state of matter we understand.

We are able to make it in the LHC and observe some properties of it. For example it is a fluid and works (nearly) as a Fermi Liquid. It is the 5th known (major) state of matter. During this stage (as far as we know) the amount of anti-matter and matter were basically the same.

During this time the universe was inflating rapidly.

We think there was a field force we literally call " inflation" (good job being original). This field force increased the inflation of the universe a large amount in a short period of time but then decayed into particles because of quantum fluctuations. It would have acted similar to the Higgs field or dark energy. This lasted throughout the "entire" big bang. But at around 10^-32 is when other things take center stage, in our minds at least.


PART TWO.

(big bang theory)
( big bang timeline)
image source: www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/uploads/infographics/full/10824.jpg
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/FOUR_FUNDAMENTAL_FORCES.png